it's cozy time again and time for spreading some goodies. this time something for the alpha folks

tru64 is very nice except for one thing: setld. it's extremely slow and any sort of software management turns into a real pita. makes you miss irix' "versions" very much. how nice would it be to have something similar for the good ol 'osf.well, don't despair, there's hope: RACinst. one of my in-house tools for that very purpose. before going any further here's a look at the included help:

Queries:========All search queries are case insensitive and include partial matches.Use the quick mode first to see whether that's enough already. Thenormal search relies on the descriptions provided by the installedpackages so something might be missed. To be on the safe side after aregular search you can take the base name of the found packages and runthat through quick mode. It might find more and shouldn't be a problemeven on older machines because both modes are very fast. Especiallycompared to setld.The native setld never deletes entries completely so always have a lookat the "Status:" line to see what's actually installed. It should alsobe obvious for all results having a size of 0.

Listing:========This mode mimics IRIX' "versions" program. Used without a search termit will display all files of all installed packages; usually piped intogrep. Unlike the query modes this one adds the package name to every line.Used with a search term it will only show the files installed by the namedpackage.

Deleting:=========Although listed this mode will only delete directories if they're emptyafter deleting all other files of the package. Using -f does not changethat but only skips initial checks.Unlike setld RACinst does actually delete all package files including thekit files.You can specify more than one package to delete after -d separated byspaces.

the main reason for creating RACinst was speed obviously. depending on the machine and used components you can see a speed increase of up to 60x compared to setld.RACinst is not only very fast but also thorough. for example uninstalling something with setld does not clean things up properly. the package info files are left behind which can cause trouble in quite some situations and also makes listing actually installed software cumbersome.RACinst does not need any additional libs and doesn't create any files. it has been built on tru64 5.1 and i have no idea whether it works on other versions or not

unlike my ebay sniper this one does not contain any private data so it's a free-for-all download. merry christmas